


Proud

by orphan_account



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 18:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1658327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scarlet has been building the same machine for her entire life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proud

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flecksofpoppy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flecksofpoppy/gifts).



> Prompt: Scarlet - Simply, I would love some Scarlet backstory. How did she get to Shinra? How did she change when she was there? Did she? What's going on in her life during Before Crisis versus the OG? I would adore some kind of slice of life fic, or longer if you're feeling ambitious, about Scarlet's past and how she comes to be the villain we all know and love(?).

Great chunks of grass and wet earth and sizzling plastic hurl through the air, the acrid smell; heat, chemical, bright. 

The sound brings her mother running, front door banging open, hanging on the hinges as she throws herself out onto the lawn, as the neighbors spill onto porches and peer through windows. Scarlet is only ten, this first time, but she's old enough to know that because of the rain, no one had been looking out their windows. There's no hiding the evidence of the bottle bomb at this point, but she still blames the meter wide whole in the back lawn on something she'd found, and had the caution to throw pebbles at. 

Scarlet hadn't expected the noise. The little references she'd found in a book had born out so much more spectacularly than she'd ever have hoped.

As Spring turned into Summer, and then Fall, the grass grew back in. The neighborhood warnings about the dangers of common household chemicals died down. Nobody ever got around to filling in the hole. 

-  
She has an image in her head.

When she was eight, and school was canceled for the day, her father took her with him to the factory he managed. It was a long drive, or at least, it seemed long at the time, in his old truck, over hills and hills of ice to the low, gray-walled building. She always knew when they were getting close, because she could smell the oily smoke long before the twisting road brought anything into sight besides endless grass or snow. 

He had a secretary with tired, dark eyes, and red sharp nails. She brought coffee for her father where he sat, looking through tinted glass at the thrumming machinery, the rhythmic limbs of the workers. She brought hot chocolate for Scarlet, and sometimes white candies that tasted like something bright and cool and far away that she had no name for. She was given pencils for her schoolwork, and crayons for after that. And for all that she could press against the glass, she could never see as close as she wanted. It had been made very clear that she was not to leave the observation room. When she was done with her school work, she drew diagrams. Different colored crayons trying to fit together the moving puzzles of the machines she was not allowed to know.

Once, her father was in a meeting. Men in gray suits from a city she didn't know the name of, but a company she did. Quietly, while he was locked in the conference room with them, and she was puzzling with her crayons and adding details with pencils, the door opened. "Scarlet." The secretary had half let herself in, like she was in a hurry. "Do you want to see the floor?" 

Outside of the observation room it was loud. Scarlet held her hand as they hurried out of the observation room, and down the metal stairs, their footsteps swallowed by the pounding vibration of the factory. Scarlet still had her half finished drawing clutched in tight, but nobody noticed the flurry of reds and yellows as they walked. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to them at all. While the line spat out bullets by the thousands, the workers moved as if to talk between each automated interval, but Scarlet could not make out any words. All she could hear was metal, all she could smell was oil. She liked it. 

She understood that they didn't have a lot of time, that meetings with the men in gray suits were never long, that someone might come out of the meeting room for water, or to call for coffee, or whiskey. She knew that this might be her only chance to see the whole floor, and the machines she'd spent so many afternoons trying to solve. But there was one in particular that held her still. 

Her whole life, she has an image in her head of steam, and claws and molten orange.

-  
Her first year at university, Scarlet puts an entire chair through the wall of one of the lab rooms, in an attempt to correct a know-it-all classmates misconception about the merits of solid fuel propulsion. 

That classmate turns out to be a nephew of the dean, and she is promptly threatened with expulsion. 

Her adviser turns out to be the single greatest donor the to university, and has personally funded the construction of half of the campus buildings. 

She makes perfect marks in all of his classes.

-  
Her high school had a robotics class, but none of the girls ever got in. She asked her father how she was supposed to run the factory if she didn't know how everything in it worked. He told her managerial and accounting skills were more important, and bought her those courses at the junior college in place of it. 

He laughed indulgently when she tried to explain that she'd read the textbooks for those already, and they were really, atrociously dull. After all, she made no secret of liking mathematics and design, surely there wasn't much difference.

On her sixteenth birthday she broke into the robotics classroom with Jimmy Olmak. He was supposed to be taking her to a drive in movie, but they'd both gotten bored fifteen minutes in. It was more fun to creep around the grounds themselves than to watch twenty-somethings dressed up as teens do the same. The school at night was a different kind of dark than the one they had laughed at on the screen. It was windy, in an unpleasant way, and it turned out they couldn't map the outside of the building so well as they knew the halls. But they took turns peering through the unlit windows, while the other kept watch for...something, and the edge of fear wasn't harder than the thrill of it. There was a strict notion of where teens could be after dark in their little town, and they had to hide twice, stalk still but giggling in the long shadows of trees while the lights of the patrol cars rolled near them.

She found the window first, and wedged it open on her own.

There was no warning music as they crawled inside, and no security alarms, though they'd not moved for two minutes just be sure. With a breath and laugh he'd led her around in the dark, to the supply bins and the barely readable posters. She had a good sense for how pieces fit together, better than he did, but it was better to hold them in her hands than to just say their names. 

But the thing she was most interested in was Jimmy's project. The one she'd been 'helping' him with since the first day of term, but had never gotten to see. She knew it immediately, without being told which station was his. And while the light from the window illuminated too far to the left, it still felt centered in the room. Nothing else had claws quite like the ones she'd drawn out for it. 

He took a screwdriver from the shelf, took off one claw, and took it apart for her piece by piece saying, 

“It looks mean enough, but I haven't told the teacher yet that I can't figure out they hydraulics. Figured you might want a look at it first.”

“The joint is wrong.” She'd known immediately, taken the tool out of his hand to show him a new configuration. “There's nothing wrong with your propulsion, but you're telling it to do too much.” She showed him how to make the same movement lighter. They build and they build for what feels like minutes, but is actually hours.

“Your dad still thinks we're dating. Don't wanna know what he'll do to me if I don't get you home by eleven.”

“And he can keep thinking that if he wants.” She said, tossing her hair. She hadn't been ready to leave, had been much to pleased to be surrounded by the smell of metal and the looming shapes of the classes half-finished projects. And she didn't really care that her dad probably would have Jimmy's hide, except that then he might stop hanging around with her, and she did enjoy his company. She slipped a class copy of the textbook and tucked it under her jacket.

She hadn't read under the covers since she'd been little. Her walls were covered with fashion cut-outs, and her own designs for clothes and tech alike. Some, she'd been sketching out since those afternoons spent in the factory. 

She already knew most of what the textbook had to tell her, but it was the idea of something official, something concrete that kept her up.

_  
Coffee isn't what she expects, and when it's asked for, the notion that it really is just coffee takes her by surprise.

She's almost twenty two now, graduation drawing near, and with her father's company bought out she has a pile of loans, but in her mind, she is finally free. 

Her adviser has heard that she hasn't applied to any positions with ShinRa, and is worried. After all, they are buying everyone who's anyone to do with her field. He has a few strings. It would kill him to see a mind like hers go unpracticed. 

She hasn't applied because she'd rather work for herself, and she isn't sure yet whether working for the company that's bought hers would be more or less like that. 

“I know the president.” He tells her. “He's a personal...fan, if you will. Funds so much of my research...”

“Yes, I've seen the plaques all over the engineering building.” Bored. The coffee itself is slow in the making. She'll let him reveal his hand.

“Of course, your history lessons will have told you that ShinRa Corporation began as a small arms manufacturer.”

Of course, she did know that, even if history was one of the classes she wiled away by drawing. She doubted there was anyone on the planet who did not know ShinRa's origins. 

But everyone knows that small weapons are no longer enough. She's seen the televised tests like anyone, choreographed though they may be. She can call up easily the smell of Mako and money. She has that image in her head still, of something fierce and bright, and hers.

_  
She showed up to her interview with a handgun of her own design, that relied on an internal Mako stabilized combustion core. Much more durable than the gunpowder reliant models.

It was a blatant violation of intellectual property law.

She was hired immediately.

She had a tiny office against the back of another departments wall, that became a wide-windowed corner suite supervising it's own floor in a matter of three years, as war proved every cent as profitable as energy, and a good deal more inspiring.

The first Mighty Grunt came to life under her hands. She soldered it together in a spacious workshop that smelled more of antiseptic than oil, and when she had finished, still in her work suit and covered in grease she used it to build another, and she used that one to put a dent in Hojo's budget, because he'd been complaining that it had been cut in the last few years. After that, the President had her department make four more of them.

And after that, she got the go ahead to put her powder-less guns into mass production, provided she could prove they could maintain themselves in the many sub-optimal conditions of the field.

In Corel she shot six people to death, and shot the arms off of two more. It was an efficient cleanup, and an excellent opportunity to test. 

After that, life started to get quiet.

_  
They are not at war again. At least not by some definitions of war. Not publicly.

This is almost a shame, because war means funding. Specifically, war means funding for her. Not her department. Her department is auxiliary. That is perhaps the one thing the previous president had understood. 

And she had had so many perfect, deadly creatures set out in lines and prototypes.

So she is surprised when Heidegger lumbers into her space, but she doesn't have the time of day for him. Public Safety is spoiled. Some of the executives have actual work to do. She has blueprints spread across her desk, and maintenance orders. General Affairs it seems cannot keep a weapon working for more than three weeks, and she's fine with that, because it gives her something to upgrade in this time of imposters peace.

He's pulling one blueprint from the corner, where she's kept it specially for years. The perfect blueprint. The one she's been drawing again and again since she was eight, with crayons and pencils and finally crisp blue ink. 

And he hums at it, after a few moment, with money in his voice.

Huge proud claws and molten red. Perfect for a new war.


End file.
